We have an exceptionally interesting guest today: a dual-chip XGI Volari Duo V8 Ultra graphics card from Club 3D company. eXtreme Graphics Innovation is a new player on the highly competitive 3D graphics market, who decided to break and enter the scene with an expensive dual-GPU part. Historically graphics cards with two processors were able to demonstrate exceptional performance, but were quoted at a very high price-point. Dual-chip products on XGI Technology do not cost more than competitors’ single-chip offerings, but are they really fast in today’s games and have a bright future? Find it out with us!

Yeah, the fillrate of the newcomer is far from perfect. When there are no textures it can be compared to that of RADEON 9600 XT, however, as soon as we need to lay at least one texture the performance immediately falls down beyond all acceptable limits and stays there as the number of textures increases. We can’t explain this disaster by inefficient texturing algorithms and small texturing caches – the performance drop is too huge even compared with the results of the previous tests. Volari Duo looks OK when performing some operations with the Z buffer, but only against the background of mainstream solutions. Even the 16 pipelines do not help here, as their efficiency is pretty low, too.

Now we disable Z writes:

Nothing changes: the card still slows down when we have to process at least one texture. Now we enable Z writes, but disable color writes:

The situation here is surprisingly similar, even though all other testing participants run close to their theoretical performance having got rid of the texturing workload.

As we see, the TMU of Volari graphics chip can hardly be called efficient, which is the first big drawback of the new XGI solution.